Houston civil rights leader William Lawson honored by officials gathered for dedication of memorial to Martin Luther King Jr.

A civil rights icon from Houston — the Rev. William Alexander Lawson – was honored with other pioneers of the nationwide movement on Thursday by political and civil rights leaders gathered in the nation’s capital for the dedication of the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr.

Rev. William Lawson with Martin Luther King Jr.

Lawson, founding pastor of Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in 1962, became close to King during the early days of the civil rights movement. Lawson’s church sponsored the Houston chapter of King’s activist and non-violent Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that pressed for sweeping change across the Old South.

The luncheon is “a major honor to me,” Lawson told the Houston Chronicle. “People who came along in ‘60s are old like I am. We look back on the transformation from a segregated nation to a nation (that is) not entirely un-segregated but we can celebrate the progress we’ve made.”

Lawson, 83, a contemporary of King’s, said he shared King’s commitment to having churches take on a responsibility for helping people in the local community.

“Worshiping God is not complete unless you help your neighbor,” Lawson said. “That theology drew me long before I knew of civil rights.’’

The luncheon honoring early civil rights activists drew hundreds of paying guests to the cavernous convention center in the nation’s capital to hear Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, former Georgia State Sen. Julian Bond and Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., among others, describe the impact that the civil rights movement has had on their lives and the nation.

Holder said both he and President Barack Obama had been beneficiaries of the civil rights movement clearing away hurdles to advancement to the pinnacle of power in the United States.

Jackson Lee, who worked in the summer of 1970 for King’s SCLC in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama while attending Yale, said she had taken up the “tools of the law” to shape and implement social change. The University of Virginia-trained lawyer said she would continue to “litigate my entire life against injustice.”

“We expect somebody else to do that,” Jackson Lee said. “But we must do it ourselves; we must never give up on what is justice.”

Lawson recalled that contacts with activist students while serving as director of the Baptist Student Union and a professor of Bible at Texas Southern University and then later at his own church near campus had galvanized African-American leaders’ drive for civil rights in Houston.

“At the time I had a hard time understanding why they would take risks,” Lawson recalled. “Then I realized the strength of their convictions. It was necessary even if they had to risk arrest. They had the modern 20th century notion that it was time for justice in the nation.”